What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book of literary criticism about allegory?

The Allegory of Love was C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book about allegorical literature and courtly love.

The full title is The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Published in 1936, it examines the development of allegorical writing and the literary tradition of courtly love from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Lewis discusses writers including Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton.

The book was a major early success for Lewis as a scholar. It helped establish his reputation as a literary historian and won the Hawthornden Prize in 1937. Its argument connects literary forms with changing ideas about love, morality, and human relationships.

The date is an important point of identification: The Allegory of Love was published in 1936, not 1943. Lewis’s 1943 publication was Perelandra, the second novel in his science-fiction trilogy. The title is also sometimes shortened in conversation, but the canonical book title begins with “The” and ends with “Love.”